Samsung Portable SSD T7 Touch Review (500GB)

Anvil’s Storage Utilities (ASU) are the most complete test bed available for the solid state drive today. The benchmark displays test results for, not only throughput but also, IOPS and Disk Access Times. Not only does it have a preset SSD benchmark, but also, it has included such things as endurance testing and threaded I/O read, write and mixed tests, all of which are very simple to understand and use in our benchmark testing.

TRUE DATA TESTING

For our true data testing scenario. we elected to put a number of portable SSDs side by side, including a TB3 drive as well as the Samsung T7 being used with the USB 3 adapter. The test consists of placing four 15GB data files (pictures/video/music/OS data) onto each device and copying that file to a new location on that device.

In looking at these results, we can see that the Samsung X5 TB3 Portable SSD is way ahead, much as expected. Right behind that are the Orico and Plugable Portable SSDs that use the JMicron controller followed by Crucial, Samsung and ADATA which use the ASMedia controller. Lastly, using the Samsung T7 with the USB 3 adapter is significantly slower than we see with USB 3.2 Gen 2.

REPORT ANALYSIS

The Samsung T7 Touch enters the storage market right beside several competitors. It comes in at the mid-performance range with the Samsung X5 TB3 SSD being at the top of the pile for performance. Performance wise, it does what it is supposed to but didn’t show up as a top performer in the USB 3.2 Gen 2 comparison. Similarly, we might wish pricing was just a bit lower.

The advantage that the Samsung T7 Touch does have is that is one of only two external storage devices to use fingerprint security that we know of, the other being the Lexar F35 Jumpdrive. With security enabled on the T7 Touch, there is very little performance loss compared to it being an open drive, and fingerprint recognition is almost instant which is a huge plus.